f13.net

Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution has the first episode for streaming on its site. (http://abc.go.com/watch/jamie-olivers-food-revolution/SH5517964/VD55121540/maybe-la-was-a-big-mistake)


I first encountered him from his TED talks. After watching this, I am at a loss for words, completely. You will weep for your children.

"Pink Slime (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/us/31meat.html)" Is just what you think it is.  :ye_gods:

A friend of mine went into a chippy in Scotland a few years ago having been told they did fantastic battered Mars bars. The guy running the shop told them that they'd stopped doing those and that they could all thank Jamie Oliver.

Basically people are stupid and unpleasant when it comes to educating them about food (until such time as you actually get through to them, which I guess is the good part of the show).

It's even more depressing if you compare how we do school lunches here in the US to what they do in a country like Italy. There's a segment in the show Jamie's Great Italian Escape where he visits an Italian elementary school and sees how they make school lunches there. Maybe I'll post that segment to YouTube -- they don't distribute that video in the US, I had to import it from Amazon UK.

Except that's total bullshit and a fine example of Scottish humour at the same time.

He is like a lot of well-meaning people who think they know the right way to live, pay little attention to the actual limitations on budgets and institutions, and are dumbfoundedly unable to grasp why folks might not welcome a sincere, innocently self-righteous, outsider telling them how to live their lives. And of course just as polite society gave a huzzah and a shout-out to missionaries out to convert the benighted heathens largely to confirm their own sense of being better than those heathens, so too do people largely watch this sort of stuff to compliment themselves for their food morality. I mean, yes, of course that horrible shit that gets added to ground beef is indeed horrible shit, and chicken nuggets are made with pulverized bone and tendons and crap. But on the other hand, premodern butchery of the organic kind that we foodies exalt pretty much used every part of the animal too. Sausage wasn't made from beef tenderloin and pork shoulder. The distance sometimes between highly industrialized food processing and non-industrial food processing is sometimes less far than we suppose, and teaching kids to fear "icky things" not only doesn't work but might have perversely unintended effects.

The real issue in the end isn't teaching the heathens to convert to foodieism. It's all about the money: you want good-quality school lunches? Add it to the budgets for schools, make it a genuine priority. You want good-quality food in supermarkets? Sure, educate the consumers, but you need to have subsidies behind that kind of food production rather than behind corn syrup and cheese.

That said, it's kind of a good show. In part because a lot of this stuff comes out in the end. In fact, I almost think Oliver is purposefully staging himself to be more clueless than he is.

Oliver used to be an entertaining wacky chef from England. Somewhere in the last few years, he lost his fucking mind and went all crusader on us. While he certainly has good intentions, the talk with him and the fast food restaurant guy was maddening. He ran right up against the American spirit in that conversation. Yes, it's better, but it cuts down my profit and my customers won't like changing the stuff they eat even if it's killing them.

I had heard about the pink slime thing from a really good documentary, Food, Inc. (http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Food_Inc./70108783?trkid=2361637#height1940)

I always find it annoying to be told how to eat healthy vegetables from a man with 50 fucking acres of vegetable fields and his own team of personal gardeners out his back door.

And then he rails at people in council flats for eating chips.

Don't get me wrong, he's RIGHT, but not in the right way....

Yeah, Oliver is right, but he completely ignores the fact that eating healthy is EXPENSIVE, especially in America.

I don't think he does. I do think he feels, what ever the cost, we should be morally bound to provide better food to children.   

That's fine if the guy telling me is using his last farthing.

Coming from some cunt worth millions, it just sounds pompous.

And I don't necessarily disagree when it comes to our school systems. The entire education system could use a boost equivalent to a fraction of what we spend on defense.

But telling people living paycheck to paycheck that you need to pay more FOR TEH CHILDREN comes off, as Ironwood said, just a wee bit pompous from a guy that could buy and sell me before lunch.

I'm not sure why it matters whether or not Jamie Oliver has a comfortable life (that he worked very hard for). It's not like he has billions of his own money with which to solve the problem himself.

It does if the concerns are financial, and his efforts are mostly being a loud idiot while lining his own pockets rather than donating his own money to the cause.

He gives quite readily to other causes like his foundation to help disadvantaged youth through culinary careers. If he did a show on that, and preached it's success to helping out those whom society gave up on, I am behind him 100%.

Coming across the pond briefly to tell us our children are fat? Thanks, numbnuts. We knew that. Get back on your fucking jet and take Michael Moore, Al Gore, and Michael Spurlock with you.

He does put his own money these things. Dumbfucks.

Because it's mostly just 'Come On, You Can Do It, Try Harder' type fucking nonsense, rather than practical and cost effective advice.  Have you tried his 30 minute meals ?  I have.  I've tried almost all of them now.  That shit ain't cheap.

Further, he talks about how 'easy' it is to grow your own vegetables.  To squads of people living in a council tower block.  He's so far removed from the poverty, he doesn't have a fucking clue.

Really.

Enlighten me. Point me to dollar figures please. In the US, not the UK.

It matters because it makes his claim "Lazarus, heal thyself". Railing against the bad food people eat is one thing. Proposing societal solutions is another thing.

Telling people they can just do it if they try, when they can't, because that shit is expensive, time consuming, and space consuming. Likely three things they do not have in excess... which he does as a millionaire chef is just patronizing.

I live where food is cheap. But I am busy as all fuck, so i rarely have time to make good food or make sure that i can keep fresh vegetables around and I am poor due to the whole college student thing. I know that i can find lots of places that have great food that is fresh that i can go and buy from. But i can't go out every night(I need that money for lunch when i have 12 hour days), and i can't waste 30 minutes to hour preparing food and cleaning up after the process.

So shitty food it generally is

Here is the link to his US foundation.
http://www.jamieoliver.com/us/foundation/jamies-food-revolution/about

Its listed as a 501(c)(3). So its financial statements must be public somewhere. Not sure how much of his own money goes into it.

The recipes listed on the US site dont look particularly expensive, they simply use {gasp} fresh ingredients.

Price out fresh ingredients sometime. Then stack them up against processed shit. Then consider both in bulk. Then consider the labor time involved in prepping fresh ingredients and bundle that into the cost.

You might learn a few things that will surprise you.

When you actually price out the cost of a meal for a single person, including opportunity costs it can actually be cheaper to eat out than it is to make something yourself.

I mean, prep time+dishes+travel time to the grocer+actual food costs.

It probably takes me 30 minutes less time to eat out than it does to prepare for a single person per meal (ordering in is even easier) including all travel time.

If i value my time at 10 bucks/hour then i have to get the food costs under 5 dollars in order to make it worthwhile to eat in. if i value my time at 20 bucks/hour (and this is not an unreasonable assumption given my intertemporal consumption on expected profession) then the food has to be free in order for it to be cheaper for me to make something myself.

Amazing effort made to miss the point guys. Look him up, the man has given his own house to support his causes.

I am looking him up. His American version of this Food Revolution is establishing a fund through America Gives Back, Inc. The charity was a rebranding rollover that took the donations from an American Idol donation drive back in 2007, and established an endowment. From what I can see by going through their tax records, they never received any more cash of consequence beyond the initial push done then. It's run primarily by UK directors and staff.

It took in $71M and held back $10M which it managed for the last 2 years for reasons I can't directly see. They haven't donated any of that money or paid their officers anything. It's just sitting there. When they release the 2010 990's I can tell you more, but I'm confused as to why Jaime decided to use that particular fund which is a holding ground for large amounts of money for last couple years, or why it felt the need to rename itself after the original American Idol contest.

It's also directly connected to a $6M donation from Newscorp (FOX).

I don't actually care that much about his own donations. I care about whether what's telling people takes economic constraints into any kind of meaningful consideration. He could agree to donate every penny he makes until he's 90 years old and it wouldn't make a meaningful dent to the gap between what he's telling people and institutions to do and the actual resources that many of them have at hand. His heart is in the right place, his basic insights are sound, and the show is watchable enough. But something about it still grates on me, partly because he's like a great many people that blithely tell other people how to live the right way without taking into account some of the reasons why they don't--or can't.

Do you get fucking lost in the grocery store, or something?  I'm in & out with a weeks worth of groceries for a family of four, including picking out fresh produce, in 30-45 mins, tops.  That's less time than it takes to get a pizza.   Prepping and cooking is easy if you're not making some elaborate weekend-only meal.  The longest it's ever taken me to cook a weeknight something was 45 mins and that's because I'm not the one who usually makes the enchiladas, so I had to read each step of the recipe.

People will go to great lengths to justify the eating decisions they make. You might find if you don't eat like shit you won't feel like shit i.e. it's not all about the immediate cost.

It takes me 3 minutes to throw a salad together for lunch in the morning. Cheap as hell too.

Brown rice - $.79
Red Beans - $1.09
Can of tomatoes - $.89
Smoked Turkey Sausage - $2.50
Frozen cut onion and peppers blend - $1

Total - around $7 with tax

I can eat dinner from that for four days, with some salad sides. It's healthy, low fat, and contains a lot of quality minerals. I also usually toss some chopped spinach in it or some collard greens. You make it on a Sunday and reheat it in containers, and it's less than $2 a day.

Exactly.  Now, if the problem was you live in an urban environ and don't have access to a grocery, that's a more believable complaint as it's a real and growing problem.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28300393/ns/health-diet_and_nutrition/

India is a country of over a billion people with a processed food market of about 2%. It is far far more expensive to eat process food there than the other way around.

I don't live in America, but I have visited, and you don't have to choose between expensive and fast food. As Paelos points out well. Grain and pulses are not expensive, and you can get spinach, tomatoes, carrots, cabbage, etc without having to mortgage anything.

I do agree that Jamie is a but of a nutter (read a good interview with him a while back - the man seems to get about 2 hours sleep a day and half the stuff he talks about never happens) who has little perspective on how to translate and communicate his ideas about food to the reality that most people deal with, but he is well meaning and I do agree with his aims in a general sense. Education and access would be the biggest problems most people would face, and as is nearly aways the case, more good would be done by coming in and working you how and why the current system works before proposing solutions to fix it.

Yes, when you purchase enough food for a family of 4 it makes sense. But I purchase enough food for a family of 1. It takes me about 30 minutes to do my shopping, probably less(would be more, but I don't buy as much perishable food that requires picking). So lets say it takes 30 minutes and I will get about 5 meals out of it before the fresh food starts to go bad.

So, 6 minutes per meal, 30 minutes to make it including prep, 45 minutes including cleaning up the dishes, pots/pans.

I guessed 1 hour to eat if I prep it and 30 minutes if I get it made for me, instead it was 51 minutes. I assumed a 10 dollar price tag on the meal. If i order then the time is fucking zero because i can do other stuff while waiting for the food to come. [And i can do other things while waiting for food at a restaurant too]


Where the fuck do you people live. The cheapest spinach in Richmond VA comes from the salad bar and its 5 dollars/pound. All other spinach is in excess of 10 dollars a pound.

I live in Sydney. But I was just using a random example. Broccoli? Kale? Cabbage? Any other green vegetable will do.

Surely they're not all super expensive. Surely there's a market or green grocer somewhere that doesn't cost the earth.

Also if you're just cooking for yourself; make too much and eat it for lunches?

I don't get the "my time is worth $x" thingo either. Sure it is, when you're at work. But when you're not at work it's not, and when you're making yourself dinner it isn't a choice between "work and get someone else to cook and pay them $10" that often, it's normally "sit around watching tv, playing a game and get someone else to cook and pay them $10", which doesn't come out in your favour.

Also cooking can be fun and relaxing and a good way to stop and think about the day, rather than constantly distracting your brain with stuff.

[PS. Whenever I am just cooking for myself I can always wash up everything while cooking, leaving only a plate/bowl and utensils for afterwards]

Dude, get frozen spinach for $1 for a 12oz box. It's about eating the vegetables, not making your life a complicated mess.

You were right.

If these are actual, non-inflated numbers then you are just really, really bad at shopping/cooking. Also, you could eat like a king for $10/meal cooked at home for a single person.

Cooking when you live by yourself really does suck though. Either you eat the same one or two things every day for a week or something goes bad.

Because Americans are such fat-asses I guess it's really hard to buy portions that are appropriate for one person. There are some things that I just cannot buy, like all cheeses, unless I want to eat a fucking cheese sandwich every day or have half of it turn to mold.

Wife and I go to the store to spend time together. We spend 50 to 60 bucks, and normally get three meals a day for 5 days out of it. This includes breakfast and lunch fruits, things like oatmeal, reasonably priced cuts of meat, beans, rice, eggs, milk, fresh vegetables. When fresh vegetable prices get high for what ever reason, canned vegetables and frozen vegetables are still a much healthier thing than fast food option. I am certain, too, that we could probably even stretch that spending if we cut back on portioning, which would probably be even better.

 If you take fast food or restaurants into account, I don't know anywhere you can get off for just lunch for less than 5 bucks, and that's cutting it tight. So me and my wife each spending 5 bucks on lunch each for 5 days equals 50 bucks, and that number is conservative. So by going to the supermarket, we got 5 days of meals at three meals a day for the money we would have spent on just lunches if we ate fast food crap.

I've lived all over the united states, from urban sprawl to the middle of nowhere. I have never lived anywhere in the US where there wasn't a super market with fresh vegetables. My entire life it has been cheaper to buy meal ingredients from a supermarket  and make then than it is to go out to eat. I don't understand the excuses some of you make for eating poorly.

If you buy a block of cheese and slice what you need, then wrap it tight with plastic wrap it can last much longer than you would think. Also there are these things in stores, they are called the deli. Ive never seen a store without one, you can have them slice cheese for you at no extra charge, and you can order however little you want, because they charge by weight.

If your cheese molds, cut off the moldy part and eat away.
Including travel time yea, its pretty close.

Honestly it sounds a lot more like you just haven't learned how to cook healthily and efficiently rather than it being unpossible. If you're cooking for yourself you shouldn't be doing a full, from scratch 3 course dinner every night, that does take a lot of time and ends up with you choosing to just get take away half the time because you don't feel like putting in any effort. Making a big batch of stuff on the weekend and refrigerating it is pretty great, cooked food will last at least a week in the fridge, stored properly and if you know you'll get sick of it you can freeze it. It's also possible to stick a lot of variation into side or veggies that you have with it which can add some variety while still letting you just reheat the main portion of your meal. Stuff like salads are quick and easy to put together as long as you know a few basic things like dressings to add or main things you can toss in.

Also, as has been said, buying frozen veggies is great. You get more or less the same goodness without worrying about things going bad and less cost. Shopping also takes a lot less time if you've spent some time actually planning out a shopping list based around an actual meal plan with the added benefit of controlling costs and minimising stuff you end up tossing. Keep up the planning and have a few recipes learned and it becomes much easier but there's definitely a period of actually learning how to cook healthily and cheaply. Also it will take up time, less and less but it's worth viewing it as an extension of a hobby .

Your problem is that you need to stop treating every god damn decision in your life like a game theory question. 

As I've repeatedly stated, I agree with Olivers views.  His TED talk was one I posted here and it was a staggering viewing;  as there are kids that can't identify vegetables.  That's horrendous.

My point is that the way in which he attempts this message is not optimum and antagonises the very audience he's attempting to reach.

...

Also, his Jerk Chicken is a cunt to make and ended up tasting Shite when I did it.

The rest of the noise here bothers me not at all.

(Also, I'm thin.  Kinda. )

I live in a basic middle-class suburb near where I work. 10 minutes from me by car is a Trader Joe's, a decent large supermarket chain, and a smaller supermarket that's pretty good. I have a moderately large vegetable garden in the summers. I'm a foodie, so my bad weight-accumulating habits tend to operate at the opposite end from fast food and ground beef with pink slime. But at any rate, people living in my neighborhood have the means and the access to cook fresh food all the time. They may not have the time--there are definitely folks in our neighborhood where both parents are working long or odd hours and trying to juggle child care including afterschool activities--the couple across the street are an internist and a nurse and have two young kids of their own and a slightly older child by her first marriage and though they really try to cook I know that there are days where it's got to be frozen stuff or take-out or something. Ok.

Now go 20 minutes south of me and you're in a very poor small city that has many elderly whites on fixed incomes and a large African-American population. I occasionally get involved in community development and service learning projects that work there. The closest large supermarket to this city is probably the one that's near me: there are none down in the city itself. Zero. There are a very small number of corner stores that charge HUGE markups on the food they sell and mostly only sell highly processed stuff like Wonder Bread with a very small selection of not-too-fresh vegetables and no fresh meat. There has been an earnest attempt to start a farmer's market over the last fifteen years and it might finally happen soon after endless political bickering from the totally dysfunctional City Council. But it's not going to have too much and it will almost certainly operate only limited hours. There are some fast food restaurants. Many of the residents of the city do not have access to a car, and the public transportation that would get them to supermarkets are infrequent bus routes or a light rail whose only terminus is at one end of the city and where it would be a 20 minute trip with a fairly high-priced daily ticket to get to where there is a market.

I've travelled and lived in areas of the Northeast where this is pretty much the case that aren't even in that kind of quintessential situation of urban poverty--just deindustrialized pockets with a scattering of service jobs as the main employment left, where the major supermarket is probably a 20-25 minute trip away by car, might be a Wal-Mart, and the alternative is generally a high-priced corner store with limited selection.

Keep in mind that Oliver is also talking about school lunches. Take a look at the budgets that most school districts have to work with, and again, keep in mind that it's not just about the cost of the foodstuffs but also the labor time and skills involved in preparation. You maybe can throw together a salad for lunch for yourself in just a few minutes, but if you're feeding 1500 kids that's another story. Working with fresh food on an institutional scale really takes some training and some facilities that school districts can't afford at their current budgets--you can't just say, "You can do it!" if you're not willing to finance it. I sure as shit don't want three minimum wage employees with no food industry training trying to work with fresh meat or other things that could cross-contaminate in a kitchen space that isn't properly set up for that kind of work trying to serve my 10-year old some food. And honestly, given all the other things I'm expecting my school district to do for my daughter and her peers, it might be that on a limited budget, if they serve pink-slime-laden sloppy joes once a week, that's just the way it's got to be for the moment.

People who insist that they can just banish trade-offs altogether through pluck and will are never to be trusted. Someone else eventually has to foot the bill for the unintended consequences that folks like that leave strewn in their wake.

See, I enjoy his message because part of his main thrust is education, this includes teaching kids and people how to cook, shop and budget for food ( His low income food kitchens teach such things )




I can agree to a point, part of his thing is activism, bringing attention to the issues. I think his show is a good platform for that. At times his show is about him trying to figure out how to get it across to people, and the trials it causes.

This is pretty much what I feel. I have unbounded admiration for his dedication and his investment into these causes, but fuck me can he be preachy at times.

The US is slowly making Scotland's dietary habits look progressive.

I think Jamie Oliver is a lightning rod who for many people tends to reinforce the notion that there is no middle ground between organic local food and big macs and stuff out of boxed mixes. I don't think that's what he's trying to do, but it seems to be what he's actually accomplishing.

Oh spinach, $1.79/10oz bag and Cape Cod food prices are pretty high. That's actual adult curly spinach, not baby spinach which is essentially a luxury salad ingredient.

Hmm. I wonder if I can talk my partner into creamed spinach tonight... Talking about delicious stuff that takes 2 minutes to prep from scratch.

Bet its cheaper not in a bag. ( I assume in a bag you mean just leaves, and already processed/cut )

For most of the lower-income people in America, fast food doesn't necessarily enter into the equation. I'm more talking about food that you do buy in the grocery store - pre-packaged shit like mac and cheese boxes, Hamburger Helper, and other sorts of one-pot easy to prepare dirt cheap meals. These things take no skill to cook, are tasty and cheap and are horrible for you. Making fresh meals takes skill and training, even if it's just training from mommy - which many broken homes with single parents as sole breadwinners don't have time to teach anymore because they are working three fucking jobs to make sure they have any food at all.

If you start looking at drinks, it's even worse. You can get a bottle of soda for less than a buck that might last a family a day. Fruit juices cost easily 3-4 times that, and even those are using the same shitty high fructose corn syrup sweeteners that the sodas use, but at least they are better for you than the soda. Bottled water is at least somewhere in between that in costs. Milk is about like fruit juice on cost.

I'm not saying you CAN'T make fresh, healthy meals that are as cheap. But doing so requires effort and time that low-income families don't have, but more importantly, it requires knowledge and training that they don't have. In the respect that Jamie Oliver is very focused on EDUCATION, I support him. I think he's doing a good thing for good reasons.

He's just crap at delivering that message, because he comes off as condescending and he doesn't get the idea of the costs and efforts involved. And he's really crap at taking on the institutionalization of the problem, not realizing that things are the way they are because a lot of people are making a lot of money providing such inadequate product.

Blah blah blah the poor this the poor that. I grew up fucking dirt poor, so poor we needed donated cloths, and for many many years my parents couldn't afford a car or bus tickets. My parents rode broken down bicycles to work sometimes over long distances. When my parents weren't working they were sleeping getting ready for more work. I raised my sisters. We still ate fresh ingredients because my parents went without bullshit and cut their personal expenses the bone. I remember taking a bus for like an hour to the supermarket every Saturday morning for like an hour each way. They budgeted and cut costs everywhere so we could eat real food. Everything i hear in this thread is a bullshit fucking lazy ass excuse. Oliver is right, people can eat right, and train their kids right if they are fucking willing to not be lazy and make sacrifices to make it happen.

The health of our children's future is worth as much hard work as it takes to secure, period, I don't see how its a stance anyone can even argue.

Nowhere have I said it wasn't worth it, just that the system of government and commerce in America is actively trying to make it as difficult as possible to do.

That's basically how it goes unless you go frozen/canned. We don't get spinach in bulk or bunches. FWIW I'm talking about generic/stop and shop branded bags of adult spinach, not baby, which requires rinsing and a few minutes to paw through and remove the worst of the stems. The really expensive stuff is the baby spinach for salads in bags that you can pour directly into a bowl and dress.

I love this "it's all about the hard work, and not ever money, back in my day blah blah blah" trope. Keep honing it a bit and you'll be ready in no time for a Tea Party membership card. This kind of stuff shows a near-total inability to imagine circumstances and histories other than one's own, which is pretty much why most attempts to persuade people to do something different than what they do fail--because that kind of appeal mistakes the entire world for oneself. Kind of like Oliver does.

It also kinda misses the point that we did it better back then because it WAS the cheaper option and processed shit simply wasn't as ubiquitous.

I think its just very much a societal problem.   People don't consider food to be something that is an important thing to deal with it. Its like fuel or something, they feel hungry and they need to stuff some shit down their throats so they stop being hungry.

And to be fair while there is a serious problem for low income families, there are a lot of people who have the means and the time, and just don't give a fuck.  A. Lot. Of. People.  The problem isn't simply one of training, knowledge and income.  Its a problem of caring about food, putting thought beyond "this tastes good" into what you are eating.

Now, I'm vegan, and I'm not really interested in preaching veganism because to me that isn't really the point.  But the NUMBER ONE thing that I do tell people when they ask about my diet is that I don't really care what they choose to eat in the end, but PLEASE at least think about what you are eating, why you are eating it, etc.  Its getting people to just start thinking seriously about it that I think is the most important thing, because I find that when it(diet/food) comes up, most people just literally haven't given it serious thought before, and I think that is problematic.

The school lunch thing is a huge, HUGE issue. (http://fedupwithschoollunch.blogspot.com/2010/12/day-153-bagel-dog-and-eat-along.html)

No, it's not.  It's time-consuming.  If by expensive, you mean time-consuming, you're right.

The key is to make everything oneself.  A person can make nutritional meals at home using fresh ingredients, provided they are willing to cook or willing to learn to, and have access to a grocery store that sells fresh ingredients.

Buying fast food is more expensive than cooking healthy food.

Being able to price out your time is a luxury that poor people don't have, so for poor people, eating something prepared and cooked at home is almost always cheaper than eating out.

If nobody is around to pay you $10/hr, then your time isn't worth $10/hr.

I don't think we can assume that everyone has the desire to eat healthy foods, and simply lacks the opportunity.  Some people just don't care. 

In the face of every obstacle you have listed, I am sure that I could feed my family healthy foods on food stamps and little else. I learned to cook at a young age, though, and have parents who grew up during the Depression who made sure that I knew how to survive properly.  Fast food is a luxury when you're poor, or it used to be. 

Most of this stuff has already been addressed in this thread.  Fast food isn't just McDonalds, its also the super cheap ready made out of the box crap out there (Mac and Cheese, etc), which is less than a dollar per box.  Its very cheap, very fast, and filling.  I don't disagree with what you are saying - that people don't care - but it really is a combo of both.  As I said earlier, I think its far more telling when plenty of families with incomes to support a healthy lifestyle still don't eat well, and that is also incredibly common. 

Good post. Jamie Oliver might be a rich asshole,  people who advocate that everyone eat organic locally grown non-GM food are usually completely out of touch with the reality that poor families do not have the time or money to eat like this.

On the other hand though, there's a lot of stuff even poor, rushed families could do that would seriously enhance the quality of nutrition without adding serious time and monetary burdens to their daily regimen. As Malakill said, we all have seen or know plenty of people who have decent jobs, disposable income, take vacations, etc. Who are fat blimps eating pure shit. This problem is not just limited to people around the poverty line. Like Malakil alsol said, a lot could be accomplished with a bit more thought & attitude change at a personal level, and this is where advocates (even if they are flawed) like Oliver who raise awareness of these issues do provide a public service.

Yes.  Yes, it is.  In that regard, I've been entirely on his side since Elena starts school in August.

It's corporate greed edging into our education system and I'm going to stop there lest this gets political.

Yeah, that's what I get for not reading the whole thread before responding.  I need to do that.

My own gripe about our local school district is that they cut the school budget for food in order to put more into other things, but then complain they aren't getting enough from the Feds.  Schools get federal dollars for school lunch programs, and now over the years tend to rely only upon those.  If parents want schools to provide better lunches, then they need to pony up to pay for it - but that means also paying for the free-lunchers.  Most parents who care about what their kids eat, though, would rather just send their kid to school with lunch than get involved with trying to enhance the school lunch program.  

The attempts at my kids' elementary school - adding a salad bar, removing chocolate milk, offering healthier alternatives - meant a lot of food went into the trash.  Kids just wouldn't eat their apples and carrots or drink their white milk.  You can offer it, but it doesn't mean kids will eat it.  Then the district hired a very expensive nutrition expert from the Chez Panisse Foundation to advise it, but the food didn't improve flavor-wise, at least as far as the kids were concerned.

Maybe we should lower our expectations about what schools provide.  Or maybe we should use schools to educate.

I took a cooking class in junior high (and a sewing class - yes, I'm a fossil).  I don't understand why what used to be called Home Ec was taken out of our educational system.  There are no cooking classes at any of our local public schools.  

I recall hearing proposals back then about replacing Home Ec with "Life Skills" classes that taught basic things like how to shop and cook, write a check (ok so that one no longer applies), keep a household budget, sew a button and so on.  Perhaps these ought to be brought back in, along with Drivers Ed (which is now not in school either).

I had to take a course like this as well, actually at least 2 of them I think, though I think my district branded it as "home and careers."  We had some simple sewing projects, simple cooking projects, a lot of useless crap too I might add, but basically it was "how to do basic shit that you should know how to do."  I was kind of neutral to it at the time (didn't really care about the material, but it was so easy that I was just like...whatever).  Looking back though, I think I probably learned some useful stuff, and at least it got me to put some minor thought into those things.  Same with shop class - I haven't used those skills in a long time, but I feel like its useful to know how to use a wide range of power tools.

Anyway, it seems like I didn't have a real "health" class until 7th grade or so, and by that time I think you've lose your window for a lot of kids.  If, when they were real young, you started that stuff in school you'd get them to think of it as normal to think about food, and that would carry over.  Hell, even if they end up eating crap, they at least have some perspective on it.

Episode 2 is up for streaming.

Ok, This thread is all over the place. But if it gets one person to think about your eating habits it will be so worth it so here we go. All historical human diets are based on carbs. Period. No argument. Rice, wheat, ry, corn, potatoes. Given that if you chose to eat anything you need a little meat in your diet. A little, this is where americans and others get it wrong. You dont want that 16 oz steak, you dont need that. Any doctor will tell you to eat as varied a diet as possible. Fruits are awsome for you and veggies are to die for. I was gonna go on and on about dried beans but just consider its a veggie, its 3\4 of a meat and it has fiber and its a carb and the stuff is so cheap you can use it for landfill. What is the prob exactaly? I cant quit editing. Ok eggs are magic. Want to know why the dinosouars died? Eggs are magic.

Just a bit of a tangent, to something Haem said: Processed supermarket food tastes like shit. Or at least it does to me, someone who grew up eating brown rice and beans and miso soup, and had parents who didn't let him eat processed food and sugars.

I haven't been a vegetarian eating such a nutjob diet for over 15 years, but I am still very sensitive to rich foods (like chocolate cake) and meats. I have a physical response to a lot of stuff that my body isn't as familiar with as other (can't eat any pig, can't eat meat pies, cream and dairy heavy stuff makes me feel ugh etc).

Point is: Diet and habit are very very hard to change, and expecting the bodies of children to be able to happily adjust between different food at school at home is a big thing. You're not gong to get kids who grew up on the reverse diet to mine to enjoy 'healthy' lunches just by getting Jamie to stick his head in, you need the parents to address fundamental changes - which can be very very hard.

I think targeting schools is a futile exercise to be honest, but perhaps in terms of raising awareness it is a good trigger point.

Jamie Oliver is just a douche.  I have no problems with feeding kids better foods.. but that doesn't make him likeable.

Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. Carbohydrates are only a recent development. Humans have been living for thousands of years before agriculture came around. And before that we hunted (and gathered)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Steak? No problem. Protean and fat is no problem. Its the carbs that are killing us(high fiber carbs such as whole veggies/fruits notwithstanding). Want to know why poor people are fat? They can't afford food that isn't loaded up with extra carbs.  Want to know why they're fatter in the U.S.? We subsidize corn syrup so we can add more of it to everything.

Bit of a tangent. Today I went to Whole Foods and bought some food. This was the discussion at the checkout counter:

Checkout Girl: "What is this?" (Looking at pastry bag)
Me: "A chocolate chip cookie."
Checkout Girl: "And what is this?"
Me: "A grapefruit."

How do you work at a supermarket and not know what a friggin grapefruit is?

His wife is worse.

Ok Dr. Atkins.

You are all getting quite amusing in this thread. I think hal sprained his brain during his last post.

Personally, I've made a point of checking labels for high cholesteral when I shop, and avoiding those items. I'm limiting myself to overly fatty things likes sausage to no more than once a week. I started buying the odd bottle of high fibre V8 for the mornings (it tastes palatable if its cold enough). I've cut down the high fat junk snacks like chips to weekends only. I've actually adjusted to drinking 1% milk. I buy far more chicken and fish than I do beef and pork.

I still don't buy fresh veggies as often as I should, which is silly because I actually really like things like broccoli. Unfortunately, my favoriite veggies are the most expensive ones, like artichokes and asparagus. I do try to cook meals from scratch at least three times a week. Doesn't really matter though, apparently I am going to soon die of mercury poisoning from all the Sushi I eat.

As to the specific topic, douche or not, at least Oliver has people talking about this stuff. It really comes down to changing people's base attitude towards food, and that really is not likely to happen anytime soon in corporate america, because big corporations don't make money off of locally farmed produce. Oliver is a step in the right direction, but until you get Fox news telling middle America that eating crap makes Baby Jesus Cry, you guys are gonna have a hell of a time changing things.

Pretty much any doctor will tell you the same things about your eating habits for the past 20 years.

Eat more fruits and vegetables with an emphasis on leafy greens.
Stay away from white flour and sugars, eat more whole grains.
Exercise 3 times a week for at least 30 minutes.
Stay away from high fat foods and proteins, eat more fish and chicken.
Don't eat fried crap.

I mean there's a lot of other wacky stuff we toss in there, but hell, if you just did those things, you're pretty much gold.

Which is true, of course, but let's all not forget the other salient fact that a brain aneurysm or any one of a number of horrible, horrible and unpreventable accidents can kill you stone dead in a heartbeat.

So, don't be afraid to live a little either.

You fucking Fatties.

I eat pretty terribly, but I cycle ~6 miles per day and gym for 1.5-2hrs 2-3 times a week, and it seems to balance out. I get a lot of enjoyment out of my food.

Joking aside, this attitude is odd to me.  I feel like SHIT after I eat stuff that is bad for me.  Stomach aches, lethargic, etc.  I always find it odd that people don't seem to derive enjoyment from eating healthy foods and seem to think that its some kind of self flagellation to eat vegetables.

People enjoy what their bodies are trained to eat - and your bodies get trained to eat what you ate as a kid. Shifting gears, especially later in life, is downright hard because the brain has linked certain tastes to certain feelings, both good and bad. People who have not been eating fatty, salty, processed, meaty foods who try to eat a Big Mac are going to feel like shit because their bodies aren't used to it. People who are used to it don't have the same reactions.

I don't think Ironwood is taking about McDonalds here, or avoiding vegetables. You couldn't pay me to stop eating fruit and veg, but neither could you deter me from all thee other good stuff: steak, chorizo, dark sugar on my porridge, chocolate, scallops, butter, fudge etc etc. I can also only tolerate fast food about once every few months, for a given type of fast food. I fucking love a good kebab, filled with greasy meat off the hibachi, pickles, tomatoes, garlic and chilli sauce, maybe some hummous and lettuce too. I can barely tolerate food from Burger King and their ilk though. Sometimes I will get a craving to sit down and eat a four-person portion of profiteroles, but I really don't give a fuck since I pay it back hard in the exercise I do, and I also consume a ton of fruit and veg.

I accept some people do not enjoy or cannot handle rich food; but the implication that the only right way to eat is a very puritanical way doesn't carry any weight with me.

Isn't that what his training schools are all about? Change the culture and educate for the next generation?

If the food at these schools are so crap is it such a big deal to give your kids a packed lunch?

Cafeterias are so foreign to me, we have school canteens here but generally getting money for a lunch order was a special treat (or a running too late in the morning to make lunch solution).  We give our kids a sandwich, piece of fruit and another snack like plain chips/muesli bar for their lunches. 

i don't even know properly how school cafeteria's work like how I see them in movies.  Do you pay each meal or is it free for the kids and paid with the school fees?

Over here, the tax subsidise the school food.

So if you do the packed lunch, you're paying twice.  Furthermore, the once you pay is paying for shite that's killing people.

It's a worry.

The problem with your first statement is EXACTLY the one Oliver is trying to overcome.  The families that know better/care already do this, but this is about increasing awareness and creating a different culture, and to do this you really need to reach the people who don't already do that.

Usually you have to pay for school lunches, I don't know how much it costs these days or how much of the cost is subsidized in the normal price.  They do have fully subsidized plans for kids that have a hard time affording food.  I imagine all this varies by district though, I'm just remembering how it was when I was in school.

In LA, they spend 77c per child. 

Yeah the culture here (AUS) seems very different, the teachers are very involved in promoting healthy eating.  The whole time so far that our kids have been going to school (They are 7 and 9) they have been required to bring at least one piece of fruit with their lunches, and too much crap gets a note from the teacher.  Hand in hand there has also been been increases in the PE components of the curriculum and increasing the amount of exercise the kids get.  

I still see lots of fat kids though.

Can we all just agree that this is a case of the stupid lazy people ruining it for the rest of us, as usual?

No, because that's only one part of the equation. The part Oliver is running smack dab into is the systemic problems - corruption in the school board, reluctance to spend money on education in general, which translates into decreased budget for school lunches, as well as the HUGE problem of how most of our food is grown, produced, packaged and sold in order to make the food cheaper. Things like the pink slime process, lack of proper space for animals to move or breathe, overuse of pesticides, overuse of hormones without proper testing for the effects of human consumption, preponderance of untested sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup, overuse of preservatives, transfats and on and on and fucking on.

Yeah, all those recent E Coli outbreaks? Directly related to our farming system. Cows covered in shit from birth to slaughter.

Can't be.  Maybe the District pays that much, but it's on top of the money they get from the Feds, and the money from the kids who pay for lunch gets figured in as well.

"In July 2008, the USDA announced the new federal reimbursement rates for the NSLP for the 2008-09 school year: $2.57 for free lunches, $2.17 for reduced-price lunches, and 24 cents for paid lunches in the 48 contiguous states serving less than 60% free and reduced-price lunches."  More here on that. (http://www.choicesmagazine.org/magazine/print.php?article=85)

Its 77c per child.  Ill find the articles I read about it, it was a LA times piece about the show, and the school food.

EDIT:


Link (http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/04/la-school-district-fights-back-at-jamie-oliver-over-quality-of-school-food.html)


Link2 (http://www.tulsaworld.com/scene/article.aspx?subjectid=275&articleid=20110412_275_D1_CUTLIN837168&allcom=1)

But it's a heck of a lot easier to pack lunch for your kids than it is to revamp the entire school lunch program.  

In the states, unless you qualify for free- or reduced rate- lunches, you pay twice anyway. I can feed my kids cheaper and healthier than the school does (last year it was $4.00, after going up from $2.50 after hiring the consultant who said to feed kids fresh local foods, and it was so not worth it).

Yes, but they get money from the USDA for the school lunch program.  So that's what the District spends, but that's added to the pot of money they get from the Feds, not the entire amount spent.  If it was, I guarantee you the kids would be eating rice and beans, and nothing more.

The 77 cents is described as "On the plate, per meal". I assume they get huge bulk discounts from vendors, we are not talking about the things you and i find on the shelves. We are talking about mass produced junk. A "waffle" in a bag like cots a few cents. Especially when you buy 600k a day.


And it goes right to the venders who make minimum requirement items.

Ironically, rice and beans would be healthier than what they currently get for lunch.  

Free range eggs and organic milk? Oliver comes off as completely out of touch bordering on insanity.

We can't get past deep fried high fructose corn syrup and he's talking about organic milk?

It's like some kind of parody.

But it's a heck of a lot easier to revamp the entire school lunch program than it is to do away with Taxes.

I'm actually a skeptic on how easily things can be revamped. The key is finding foods that are health and the kids will eat. We had healthy food when I was a kid and it all went into the bin because it was disgusting. Finding people who can mass prep good food without using fast food techniques of boosting flavor (ie, loads of fat) is hard particularly when you're swimming against the national tide on this stuff.

Of course it goes to the vendors.  Schools haven't made lunches on-site since the dark ages when I went to school 4 decades ago.  Why?  Costs are too high for salaries and benefits for state employees to be able to provide nutritional, high quality lunch to kids.  Heck, vendors are struggling to do that as well.  

School Districts would rather spend their budget on education.  As a parent and a taxpayer, I applaud them for that, since that is why we have school districts in the first place.  Parents ought to be able to feed their kids as a priority over everything else.  If they do not do so, they are the definition of loser parents. (/rant about free lunch kids getting dropped off to school by their parents in new Cadillac Escalades deleted - no not the norm but it still pisses me off).

Minutiae.  The 77 cents gets added to the reimbursements they get from the USDA.  So, lunches cost a total of:

Free lunches: $2.57 plus 77cents
Reduced rate lunches: $2.17 plus 77cents
Paid lunches: $0.24 plus 77cents

The USDA also allows:
Free snacks: $0.71
Reduced-price snacks: $0.35
Paid snacks: $0.06

In addition to these funds, the USDA provides commodity foods (usually dairy):
In addition to cash reimbursements, schools are entitled by law to receive commodity foods, called
"entitlement" foods, at a value of 20.75 cents for each meal served in Fiscal Year 2008-2009.
Schools can also get "bonus" commodities as they are available from surplus agricultural stocks.

(Above taken from here, including link to NSLPFactSheet.pdf) (http://cafe-la.lausd.net/meal_programs/national_school_lunch)  

Note:  "Café LA is supported solely by federal and state reimbursements for meals served."  The lion's share of the cost of the school lunch program is from the USDA, and also largely subsidized by those who pay full-price.

Long way of saying that although the LASD (one of the worst managed districts in the country) only spends 77 cents per student lunch, the student lunches being provided cost a great deal more than that.

This is missing the point entirely.  The point here is to promote a culture of eating such that kids actually get used to eating healthy from the beginning, so its not such a hard thing to do later.  Kids don't magically hate vegetables, hell I LOVED fruits and vegetables as a kid - because they were the snacks we had and were normal in my household. Sure, I liked candy too,  to just say "oh kids don't eat it because it doesn't taste good" is to miss the point entirely.  

When I was in high school (99-03), to get a lunch from the school cafeteria cost $1.39.  Not sure how a parent is going to pack a school lunch for their kids that is healthy and comes anywhere close to that on a regular basis.

Peanut Butter and Jelly and an apple or banana was my staple growing up.  Cheap and pretty good for you.

But your parents aren't the norm, any more than you are.

Numtini is right.  Most kids don't eat carrots.  They end up in the trash.  It's amazing how much good food ends up in the trash.

Simply providing the choices isn't enough, but even if you were to grab a person and force them to watch nutritional videos (a la Clockwork Orange) it won't fix the situation.  

Parents and the choices they make - good and bad - influence children a thousand times more than what they learn at school.  Want to change nutrition in school?  Target the parents.  And good luck with that.

Which is pretty much what I ate because I'm not picky, but I hated eating the same thing every day while watching all my friends get to choose between pizza or the 4-5 other things they had to choose from on a regular basis.  Hell, even as an adult I don't like eating the same thing over and over again and like to vary it up, but it's hard to do if you are trying to be healthy and beat a $1.39 price point.

Btw that $1.39 also included a carton of milk, so it wasn't just food you got for that price.  

No, I understand the concept, I'm disagreeing on where an intervention can be effective. I think school lunches are probably already too late, particularly with the entire food-industrial complex stacked against them. Change the food culture of the country and school lunches will follow. Toss the current budget at a school cafeterias in the current food climate and tell them to serve healthy food and based on my experiences with healthy pre-contractor lunches, you will see most of the healthy food go straight to the bins.

On packed lunches, at least back in my day, it was almost a complete class division between middle class kids with packed lunches and working/poverty class kids with school lunch. I don't know if that's changed as everyone bought lunch on pizza day and checking the old NHS website, now thanks to contracting out food, every day is pizza day. Literally.

Yes and no.  This isn't just baout offering carrots with school lunches, this is making it a deliberate part of education in very young kids.   Its about having part of your school day set aside to learn about food and talk about food, and not just slapping healthy choices into school lunches.    This thread has been all over the place, especially with the emphasis on school lunch contents that it is missing the point that Oliver doesn't want just healthier choices, he wants food education.  And that CAN make a difference even if they choices aren't great athome

People do seem to forget this is a multi-pronged movement.

One of the issues raised by a mother on the show was that how can she give healthy food to her children, when not only does she have to fight children's inherent hate of broccoli, but she also has to fight the fact that when he goes to school, he can have a Tony's pizza with gravy on top. 3 times a week.

You do have a good point here, but I wonder how sticky the message is when it goes against everything a kid is learning in the home.  

Lady Bird Johnson's Keep America Beautiful campaign was awesome, and I believe it was one of a few factors in birthing the environmental movement that grew in the 70s.  Our school had a great many littering pick up days as a result. (I liked that a whole lot more that JFK's Fitness campaign).

My kids are being indoctrinated with Fast Food Nation, Food, Inc., An Inconvenient Truth, and similar such films, but then I live in an ultraliberal community (similar to Berkeley).  I wouldn't mind if the other sides were presented, but they aren't.  But I'm not going to swim up that stream, I indoctrinate my kids plenty at home.

My feeling is kids aren't really learning anything about food at home.  I mean, this is basically what school IS.  We teach kids about things we think are important.  We do it with math and reading and writing, and even music and phys. ed.   I really do think we should be adding food to that list from a young age, and while it isn't going to clean up all problems over night no fuss no muss, I think kids having a basic idea of what food actually is would go a long way to helping.   If you've seen the show you know there are kids who can't even identify common vegetables when they are shown them, simple stuff like this which just generally increases awareness of food as a thing worth thinking about is at the very least a good starting point.

Elena is four and cooks with me.  She knows all about food.  The idea that it's something that should be taught in a school instead is nuts.  Like all learning, it should be done both at home AND at school or otherwise you're just teaching your child to learn some pretty unimportant shit.

So just fuck the kids that don't get it at home?  I know you aren't saying that but seriously, what other way do "we" have to teach kids this stuff when they aren't already getting it at home but to teach it in school?

Clearly the meaning of the word 'both' eludes you.

Clearly you meant both, but you made it sound like its not worth doing it in school if its not also done at home and I think that is not the right way to approach.  OBVIOUSLY in the best case scenario it would be taught in both places, but we aren't dealing with the best case scenario in most places.

Instead America gets to deal with shit like Palin responding to a drive for healthier foods by crying about removing parental choice and then coming in and giving all the kids doughnuts without bothering to consult the parents.

Before I drive this into politics that's not a dig at right wing types but it seems indicative of a lot of people's reactions to being told that they're doing things wrong and especially if you tell someone they're raising their children wrong. Even if you have mountains of evidence and plenty of general common sense, tell someone that what they feed their child, happily and voluntarily, is killing the child they hear it not as an attempt at education but as you shouting, "You evil person you are deliberately tortuting your child!" Add to that parents that think whether or not their child is happily eating the food they're given is the only reliable indicator of whether it's the right kind or amount of food and you've got a massive uphill battle in education. Frankly aside from the budget and systemic issues he faces and ignoring the fact that he can be a preachy douchebag this is the thing Jamie seems to manage, at least in small communities where he gets face time. Not sure if he'll manage it as well with a city of millions.

And thus we have the plot to the show.

I assume that he does actually win people over and not just edit out anyone he failed to convince by episdoe 8 or whatever. Though in small communities that's the kind of thing you can do with pluck and grit, whether the formula has an even remotely similar effect in a much larger community is going to be an interesting test. I'm sure they'll spin it as a success either way but if he can genuinely have an effect on the parents there's a chance they can have an effect on the system. Fuck it would be hard but if you get 70% of parents sending their kids in with packed lunches there would be serious questions raised about why the government was shovelling so muich money into these food contractors.

It seems tied up into a whole range of social issues which lazy parents try to palm off onto schools. A lot of the points raised here could equally be applied to things like sexual education, manners and respect. It is depressing that there are parents who feel that they can pass off these aspects of education onto schools. Schools should do their level best not to undo what parents might teach their kids, but it has to be a partnership.

Only in this country can we make feeding children a political problem.

It's not just "lazy parents."  We're on the 2nd generation of two-income parents and latchkey kids.  (3rd in some cases.)  Kids who were raised by schools expect schools to be able to do it for their kids as well.  The biggest difference being schools just don't have the funds to do it anymore.

Right. In a substantial number of other countries, children simply don't get fed. Problem solved.

I mean, yeah, school lunches and much else under these headings pose serious issues, but the Victorian-spinsteresque pearl-clutching and self-righteous "I do everything right, why do we have so many lazy people" sociology-by-anecdote that food issues seem to inspire is a more interesting phenomenon and a bigger underlying issue than food policy itself.

I agree entirely.

Just to follow the sidetrack a bit further, do you guys all feel as if this balance between school and family and educational responsibilities thereof was somehow better managed at some specific point in the past in your nation/community? Because ok, my folks were great on this score and I feel like I'm firmly doing what I ought to be doing in teaching my kid skills and responsibilities. But as a mid-40s person, I don't look back to the late 60s-early 70s and say, "Wow, everybody back then really shouldered their burdens and taught their kids all the things they needed to teach them." As someone who studies history, I don't see any evidence for looking back further and finding a happy old world where by gum families taught kids how to properly grind coffee beans for top-quality espresso, eat green beans with salsify, and carefully hand-butcher their own chicken. Study up on the history of American food consumption sometime and if you don't come in with preconceptions, you're probably in for surprise. Americans have been eating nutritionally-challenged frozen and canned foods for a long time. Early 20th C. Chicago grew up as the Second City on the strength of a massive warren of industrial cattle butchery that would make the worst factory farm today look like a locavore's dream, and the nation ate the filthy meat that spewed forth from its bowels with gusto. School lunches in 1970 were just as wretchedly low-grade and fattening as they are now.

The changes in the last thirty years are smaller than you'd think in the US--it basically amounts to corn syrup, more audiovisual home entertainment, hypersuburbanization and excessive fear of roving pedophiles, slightly more disposable income for leisure food, and the disappearance of fresh foods from communities with high amounts of structural poverty.

You don't need a historical reference to improve something. Its quite clear our society has a food problem, be it education, lifestyle, or culture. When 10 year olds are getting diabetes, there is a problem, when most applicants to the armed forces are not acceptable due to wight and health, we have a problem.

I think the "kids won't get fed" thing is something not to be left out. School lunches weren't done to give make kids days fun, they were started because a lot of kids were reckoned to be too hungry to properly learn. In some cases, you are still just plain pushing calories.

As to parents not doing the right things. They didn't do the right things in the 19th century or during Rome's time. Trying to get people to "do it right" is as likely as a game designer making players adhere to their Vision.

I will hand it to the guy, Oliver has started a conversation about the issue. Not just here and I saw the same thing happening last time. I suspect that, not what he's actually doing with the kids, is the important part and most likely to get something done.

Nostalgia was better in my day.

But do you?

You're right about all that, but what we're seeing today is a much higher percentage of fat kids, compared to the 60s and before.  Poor nutrition today results in being too fat, not in not having enough to eat, which has been the problem historically since the beginning of time.

Fast food is viewed differently than it used to be.  It's considered a normal necessity rather than a rare treat.  Fast food joints didn't used to be on every corner; they weren't part of a normal family's regular cuisine.  The only indoor entertainment options kids used to have were books, toys and TV - now there are far more interesting options.

But why are adults getting fatter too?  This, I think, is also part of the puzzle.  The proliferation of convenience foods (meaning boxed foods or prepared foods) helps.  Are adults generally less active?  Is it the gradual acceptance of being fat?

Many good points here.

I get that hungry kids can't learn.  But how far down the road of school lunch nutrition do we want to go?  My community is taking it not only to fresh, but to local and organic (some parents want vegan lunches offered). 

That costs oodles.  As a parent, I'm not paying $4 bucks for my kid to have lunch when I can make it for her to take for $2.50, so the school just lost a full-paying customer who helped subsidize the free-lunchers.  And so the overall budget declines because the number of full-payers declines.  Pretty much all the kids who get lunch now are free- or reduced-raters, and nobody pays full price because it's overpriced in order to subsidize the rest.

We have mission creep.  What first begins as "hungry kids can't learn" becomes "food isn't nutritious enough" becomes "we need fresh, local, organic food."

(Aside to Ironwood: when my kids began school, I was far more into tackling the problems for everykid, but years of trying to work with the school administration, home/school club, other parents and so on has beaten me back into just worrying about my own.  Also, how is it possible that Elena is about to start school?  She's not still an adorable infant?)

We used to go to McDonald's about once a month. It was a 45 minute drive from where I lived and that was where the local "discount supermarket" was and my mother would take me shopping, we'd stock up on stuff from the cheap market, and then go to McDonalds. It was a big deal.

"Two or three years ago... was just another snake cult, now they're everywhere."

I would add into the mix the absolute paranoia about children perhaps sometimes possibly ever hurting themselves as well as the galloping paranoia about child predators. There's very little outside time for children anymore of the type I grew up doing where we just walked around in the woods or played by the local stream. Now what little time there is is entirely organized. If you don't do organized, kids never leave the house because they'll die if they do.

Right now, Schools are teaching bad eating habits. Those of you who keep saying its the parents role ( Its both ), have the schools going against anything you are trying to do.

By today's standards, me, my brothers and all our friends would be considered a pack of juvenile deliquents considering how we roamed our neighborhood and ran around in the woods behind our house.  Fairly large group of kids with about a 10 year age spread, so pre-teens to mid-teens.

Yup, its alarming how fast this went from "Schools really need to educate about food and teach good eating habits" to "When I was a kid we played by the STREAM, and no one even CARED."

We're missing the point here.  Big time.

Yes and no on missing the point.  Any thread like this is going to turn into a "back in my day..." one because people will always bring some flavor of personal experience into it, whether it's how they were taught about food as a kid to how other people aren't doing it right.

In honor of that, one thing I have 'trouble" with is how much today's schoolkids seem to be depending on school meals for their daily nutrition.  It's not just lunches anymore, plenty of schools are providing breakfasts as well, which blows my mind.  We have families where kids are eating 2/3 meals at school because otherwise, either the family can't or won't feed them otherwise.  I guess in cases like that, I can see why people want to just push the problem off onto the school districts because that's where they kids eat their most substantial meals, why should the family have to bother changing how they do things then since it's (sometimes) only one meal a day?

We also have ever increasing demands on workers and parents. My mother dropped me off at schools and I didn't see her again till 7pm ( Single mother, two jobs, early to mid 1980's ). I ate breakfast lunch and dinner at school. Its also why I did not know how to cook until I became an adult.

The model family you see on TV is a lie for about 90% of the country.

Currently, yeah. My diet right now is a granola bar in the morning with coffee. Then, at lunch I have a turkey sandwich with lettuce and tomato on whole wheat, baked lays and a diet coke. At 3PM, I have a reduced fat string cheese, 8oz of V8, and a banana. For dinner I have whatever dried beans with lean meat I've made, mixed with brown rice, and I stir in spinach, chopped broccoli, peas/carrots, collard greens, and/or tomatoes.

I mean really, I feel full all day, the whole process is probably $5-6 worth of food a day, and I'm not denying myself what I like.

Sorry, but that is the science. Historical diets did not include grains until about 5,000 years ago. Before that it was all fruits/veggies and meat.

Your body needs a certain amount of carbs to continue working. Specifically your brain consumes them. However; if you do not get those carbs your body can synthesize it from protean. (this is why fasting people lose so much muscle mass so fast. When the body doesn't get the carbs it needs it eats protean, when there is not enough protean coming in, you eat the muscles. After long enough you may enter Ketosis which will let you burn fat, but still probably not enough)

Nothing else in your system needs carbs. Now, this doesn't mean that some people can't use carbs. If you're going to do a lot of exertion very fast, carbs are great. But if you're not, they're pretty bad for you, whole grains or not.

Pretty sure the Asian population started doing it 10,000 years ago, but whatever. Before that, scientists are guessing we didn't forage for grains because we couldn't break them down. I wouldn't say it's rock-hard or anything.

The science is also that human lifespans (and population growth) increased with the advent of cheap carbs & sugar and improved urban sanitation. Contrary to popular belief, improvements in clinical medicine were a latecomer when it comes to explaining why more people survived their first four years of so of life and lived a bit longer on average at the end of life if they did in fact survive.

The interactions between diet, health, economic production, globalization, medicine and so on are really complex. Simple single-variable explanations need not apply, unless they're shilling for a product or a fad diet.

No, it really is sugar that is the culprit. Its surprisingly how it can be so single factor.

Then compare eating that over processed cheaper crap with the increased cost in medical care and the negative impact on quality of life.

There are any number of things I am willing to sacrifice (time, toys, etc) to make sure I and my family get a balanced healthy meal.

Priorities. Just sayin'.


Edit- Goumindong its "protein" not protean.  :grin:

Food is America's drug of choice.  Many people use it to deal with the fact that they hate their life.  Processing and concentration of calories just feeds into this. 

Think about it.  How many people do you know in your life that a) are stress free and b) love going to work every day.  I work in a field that most people consider their dream job and I only know a scant few balanced and happy people. 

I think this mentality is the real problem.  If you are treating your daily eating habits as something that needs to be thought of in terms of labor/cost etc you are doing it wrong.  Part of this entire discussion is that we need to stop thinking about food in terms of pure consumption, and thinking of it in terms of lifestyle.  Lifestyles which relegate food to cost/benefit analysis seem to have all their priorities fucked up to me.

Maybe I'm just the resident hippy dippy guy, but I simply wouldn't adopt a lifestyle that didn't allow me to eat healthy on a regular basis. 

Edit: Yes I realize this isn't always a choice, the poor can't just simply make that choice, but there are two discussions going on here and I don't get the impression Khaldun is worried that he might not make ends meet if he spends 30 minutes a day on food prep.

Like he said in the show "This food lacks respect for the food, and the people eating it".

Nothing I've said is about me. I'm a foodie, I sometimes spend an hour or two making dinner alone for my family, let alone other meals. My idea of a great Saturday is cooking for three or four hours in the afternoon. I'm not the healthiest eater but it's not because of processed food, which I rarely eat in any form.

The issue is really that food crusaders seem to have a difficult time understanding the economics of food production, distribution and consumption on both the large and local scale.

Also, they often seem to lack the ability to imagine the thinking and feelings of people other than themselves in anything but a stereotyped or caricatured fashion. This is a general problem in the United States right now across a broad range of issues, but there's something about food, body image and personal self-righteousness that seems to produce a particularly intense version of that kind of toxic self-regard.

I'm not sure this is true, but I do see as an excuse not to do anything. Did you know our corn is produced under cost to produce do to subsidies? Did you also know this is a direct impact on hunger in the world. The USA basically bottomed out the commodities market and no other country can even compete, leading to less production overall.

We make it into a syrup that is also produced under cost to produce. Its now in your ...well, everything.


If people start demanding whole foods, farms will produce it. If entire organizations, such as 600k students in one city won't change, it won't change.

It's not an excuse to not do anything, but it is an instruction to understand what the trade-offs are, what is immediately possible and what takes serious structural reforms, and so on.

When people start invoking the invisible hand, and say "But if you want great food, then we'll all get great food because supply and demand are magic", that is a case of not understanding or having any interest in trade-offs. A lot of locavore, slow-food and organic food preferences are only possible in the way they are now as middle to upper-middle class consumer choices, and depend on the main "spine" of food production being aimed at much lower and less healthy choices. Organic farming doesn't necessarily scale up to the totality of the US food market, let alone globally. Or at least not if you want to keep access to something like the range and variety of organic and high-quality food presently available in good supermarkets. Now if you want to have a strongly regulated system of food production that dictates much lower meat consumption, much higher consumption of pulses and whole grains and leafy greens, maybe that's more sustainable, though even there, don't underestimate the challenges of scaling up healthy or organic production of even the simplest crop.

And don't forget the tradeoffs involved in having a strongly regulated system of that kind, some of which don't involve food. Most of which don't, actually. Just evangelizing for healthy eating and a bit of modest regulation of factory farming is not enough to shift things so substantially. The trade-offs here are really big and complex. When it comes to it, I don't really want a nanny state telling me or anyone else that buying and preparing baby-back ribs in a three-hour weekend barbecue is going to cost me ten times what it does now because we're disincentivizing the consumption of high-fat meats. Now if there are subsidies which work in the other direction to make those ribs unusually affordable for me, ok, take that thumb off the scale and let's see what happens next. Corn syrup is something you can fix that way to a powerful extent. Though even there, and always, trade-offs: you take a subsidy away from something, you make some part of the economy less rich than it was, and you change pricing that may be built into all sorts of things, with all sorts of potentially unintended effects.

Let's do stuff, sure, but let's not be simpletons or crusaders as we do. I've studied and watched too many well-meaning, self-righteous, self-assured middle-class Euro-Americans set up development projects in Africa that they believe are pursuing common sense goals that are easily to achieve, but turn out to have all sorts of ghastly or unexpected consequences. Or projects that get abandoned because they do a little good insteaad of magically changing everything into utopia, or that cost a fuckton for marginal or ambiguous changes, etc.

Food policy is the best place ever to remember: TINSTAAFL.

By all means, lets stop advocating, because there is no perfect solution.

Junk is cheep because we subsidize it to make it so. That's it. If not for the subsidies, it would not be. We farm this way because of subsidizing. We raise cattle this way because we subsidize it. We put tariffs and huge fines on products from other countries that stop them even producing because we have them locked out of the largest consumer. You want to feed the world? Open the real competition.

We pay taxes to have cheep foods and to increase profits with little respect for consumers. Naturally grown food is expensive because we make it so. I have no need to tell people what to eat, but I take real issue by others forcing me to eat crap, because they have tilted the market so much, with my own money to boot.

Its even worse to force it on children, and teach that bad habit generation after generation.

I would be so happy if organic and locavore were removed from this entire discussion (meaning nationally, not just here). They just distract from the real food vs. industrial food issue.

The info is quite wildly available. Regan made sure farmers with no reason to be farming sugar (Because of climate) , were protected and allowed other nations to suffer economically ( Thuss being unable to feed themselves ), in fact creating the "Drug problem" when those farmers switched to a cash crop.

I don't really want to hear how its "Financially not viable" when we spend BILLIONS a year just on sugar alone. All in the name of the free market?  :oh_i_see:

Enjoy your kitkat.

This is just sugar, we can talk corn next, the keystone to about 90% of products in the USA.

What's real food if not organic? (I'm being devil's advocate: I happen to believe in more or less the same idea, but it's not self-evident).

Just keep in mind (and Oliver should too) when you're envisioning something that has never been. This is one of the things that really gets under my skin as a historian: when people invoke an implicit idea that today, we do something wrong that our sainted ancestors did not do, that we've lost our way, that once upon a time the world ate natural shit, what have you. If you are trying to think of a modern, industrialized state that seriously, deliberately, incentivizes healthy food consumption without being a nanny state, that is totally right-thinking about agricultural subsidies, and so on, seriously, this is way bigger than some well-meaning git telling fatties in West Virginia to stop eating chicken nuggets. I get fucking annoyed when people are having big visions and act like they're little, natural, obvious ones.  That's self-righteousness in a nutshell, when utopians with big dreams act like what they're talking about is the equivalent of getting the 7-11 to carry a different brand of Big Gulp Soda or something.

I have big dreams too, just I don't want to mistake them for my small-minded sneering at the dude I didn't like on the subway last week or for my well-meaning preaching to people who view me as sweetly stupid about their real life situations.

The chicken we eat is neither organic nor is it local. It's raised on a factory farm somewhere probably in Arkansas. But it is a chicken. It brings in the problems of factory farming and industrial corn, which is what it ate, but it's still a chicken. In terms of what it does to our bodies, it's pretty much the same thing that chicken did to our bodies 50 or 100 years ago.

A chicken nugget is not a chicken. It's a mixture of HFCS, artificially modified trans-fats, flavor enhancers, and chicken from god only knows how many birds mixed into a soup and extruded from a machine and coated with equally artificial "bread crumbs." That's not real food. It's an industrial product. And it's an industrial product specifically designed to be "craveable" in order to promote eating more of it, which on behalf of the corporation is simply to enhance sales, but on a consumer basis can be traced directly to health problems from both the contents and the amount consumed.

Look at the humble Dorito. One of the few non-real food things I eat. The things are designed to push buttons in your brain to make you eat more more more. I love corn on the cob and I slather it with lots and lots and lots of real butter, but I challenge anyone to tell me they would eat as much corn on the cob in pure volume as they do Doritos.

Elena might.

 :heart:

Do hotdogs next!   :grin:

It depends upon the community in which you live.  In my hippy dippy community, the schools are going against everything the parents are doing - by providing fresh healthy food, much of which ends up in the trash in favor of the snack bag of Doritos and candy bar brought from home.  Parents who care about their kids' nutrition pack their kids' lunches.  The free-lunchers don't complain about the food.  The vast majority of them are either illegal immigrants or the children of illegal immigrants.  (Roughly 35% of our elementary school population).

In the US, the National School Lunch Program has come a long way from its inception a hundred years ago or so, when kids actually did not have enough to eat and suffered from malnutrition due to a lack of food.  We, as a country, as so rich now that our poor suffer from being too fat.

How do you teach people about food if they just don't care?  There are some parents who don't qualify for the NSLP but they also don't provide a lunch for their kids or lunch money for them.  (Fortunately they are few but unfortunately they do exist). 

Further, are we creating a culture of entitlement?  The more people depend upon others to provide, the less they depend upon themselves.  (Going even further off tangent, I've noticed a difference over the years in the type of illegal immigrants we're getting in my community, since we became a sanctuary city for illegals.  People who don't even speak Spanish; they speak their native language.  Illegal immigrants no longer keep a low profile, and sign up for whatever free help they can get. Not only are they coming to the US for employment or the chance to get ahead, but coming here to take advantage of social welfare problems.  This represents an enormous cost to the state - billions each year in medical costs, educational costs, and so on.)

That's true too.  I knew kids whose parents packed them fruit and they would sometimes throw it out cause they didn't want to eat it, or threw away their whole lunch because they would rather have the pizza in the lunch line.

In the end it's up to parents, not schools.  If parents don't teach their kids to eat healthy and to like eating healthy then nothing the school system is going to do is going to change the kid's health, and instead will just waste money.  So many parents have to force their kids to eat vegetables against their will, and they do it badly to the point where the kids feel liberated when out at school and they have the freedom to eat anything they want. 

They are kids.


This is wrong. 

Care to elaborate?  Most parents I have seen punish their kids for not eating their vegetables instead of reward them (You must sit here until you finish your plate, etc..) instead of rewarding them for eating them on their own accord.  Them, being kids, will then go to school where they have complete freedom to choose which of their options they are going to eat and they are going to avoid the foods that their parents force them to eat and eat the foods they want to eat because they have no repercussions for doing so outside of parental supervision.  If parents aren't teaching their kids to want to eat vegetables and other healthy food, it doesn't matter what schools do.

I disagree with the notion that the school has influence at all. I don't disagree that kids are kids. I believe both must be working together, your example was simply the reverse of what I said earlier.

Anything you are trying to do will be reversed by what schools are teaching kids about food in the cafeteria.

Do you mean you disagree in the notion that the school does not have any influence at all?  Cause I'm arguing that the school's influence is negligible in this regard.

Yes, typo on my part.

chicken nuggets don't actually have any HFCS in them.The sauce does of course, but not the actual nuggets.
This actually has nothing to do with the amount of consumption that you do. Your body regulates your energy use based on the types of foods that you eat. In short, if you eat worse foods you will both use less energy AND get fat without increasing your caloric intake.

The child will decide what to eat.  It's one thing almost entirely in a kid's control.

One of my kids is an extremely picky eater.  (Fortunately, the other is not, so at least I know that I didn't make him a picky eater by my actions, just my genes, I guess).  He has never eaten any school lunch.  The list of things he will eat can be counted on one's fingers.  It's maddening and challenging to deal with, and he has been this way since he was about 3 (he's now almost 15).

With such a child, all a parent can do is provide healthy food choices, but a child will decide what to eat, when to eat, and so on.

I think that what schools ought to be doing is the same thing.  Provide healthy choices.  If it ends up in the trash, then tough. 

I believe we are saying the same things Xanthippe.


You may wish to look again, its in the breading of most low dollar nuggets. Fuck, its in like 90% of foodstuffs now.

The first part is mostly correct in that the complexity of the carbohydrate dictates insulin spikes and digestion time.  I'm confused about the second statement.  BMR is complex and determined by a number of factors including muscle mass, endocrine signalling cascades, and level of activity (mental and physical).  Biochemically speaking, how will eating "worse" foods cause you to use less energy?  What do you mean biochemically when you say "worse foods"?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

That guy is an idiot.

The guy may be arrogant and working a bit to push his research interests, but he's certainly no idiot. 

Thanks for the link.  While he abbreviates a few things and (grossly) oversimplifies others, his message largely rings true. 

http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-about-fructose-alarmism/
http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/02/19/a-retrospective-of-the-fructose-alarmism-debate/

 :popcorn:

So two science-y people both saying plausible-sounding things and supplying reasonble-sounding studies to back them up, and disagreeing with each other totally. I think I am just going to stick with "less calories = less pounds" since that seems to work.

After recalling the hysteria over butter and eggs that started in the 70s, and how if you ate them regularly you'd keel over dead by 50 of a heart attack, now only to find that butter is better for you than margarine (but good to limit since it's a fat) and eggs are very good for you and dietary cholesterol doesn't translate into high cholesterol for everybody, I take new theories about diet and food with a grain of salt.

Reminds me of this scene from Sleeper (old Woody Allen movie):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yCeFmn_e2c (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yCeFmn_e2c)

I agree that Lustig's work has holes.  I also agree that Lustig's talk is a bit sensational.  It has to be if he wishes to continue to fund it.  Keep in mind that successful science is every bit as much about marketing your work as any other venture.  Saying that obesity has multiple contributors is easy.  Proving which and by what proportion, well... that's harder and takes a considerable amount of capital. 

I enjoyed Lustig's talk because it reminded of the complexity of systemic versus hepatic metabolism.  He covered many of the primary pathways for the handling of fructose and hit on several key connections that make sense scientifically.  Is it alarmist?  Sure.  Scientists have been making a big deal about their work for decades.  It gets them press time which garners notariety and often funding.  If nothing else, it pays him to fly to universities and do his dog and pony show.

I like you Nebu, but I no longer feel like you are truly interested in my well being since you got that new avatar...

So, basically, science is doing its job by having two reasonably logical hypotheses duke it out?

I think more that's what's happening but dressed up in large blinking neon signs to attract attention from the media and thus funding.

I think the basic point Lustig makes, that high quantities of fructose combined with a more sedentary lifestyle could be a much more significant contributor to obesity rates and associated health problems than the calorie levels alone would suggest. The whole 'fructose is toxic and will kill you dead' stuff seems pretty dubious but then that's the part that gets attention.

Well, there's big trouble in River City.

If you read that and think that Lustig is an idiot then you have got issues of your own. The complaints are not that the science is wrong, but that its presented in a way that isn't parsimonious.

But parsimonious presentations are only good for scientists. The people that this talk is aimed at are not scientists (yes, even with the biochem, the idea is to go over the broad strokes of the process and why its bad, not to talk to scientists about biochem) it is aimed at people who otherwise say "oh hey, its totally bad for me to eat meat but this spaghetti is just fine."

Flavored Milk Banned In LA Schools  (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/15/la-schools-flavored-milk_n_877282.html?ir=Food)

Score one for the show.

Feed Them Healthy Food With 77 Cents (http://abc.go.com/watch/jamie-olivers-food-revolution/SH5517964/VD55131128/feed-them-healthy-food-with-77-cents)

Score two. They rolled out the new lunches last year. It cost half of what they were previously spending.

The students weren't eating the lunches, the program was a failure. (http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/17/local/la-me-food-lausd-20111218)

Well, let's just say I predicted that.

Notice that one of the big problems here is not even that the students prefer junk food. It's that healthy meals cooked by a talented chef for a reality show program are nothing like what's going to come out in  real-life conditions in cafeterias that have to serve hundreds or thousands of customers daily and can't afford to hire workers with any skill in food preparation. Chez Panisse doesn't scale. If you gotta eat something that's made in a shitty way by low-wage workers, odds are that quinoa salad is going to fucking suck about a thousand times worse than a chicken nugget. And since you're going to be outside of most food distribution systems, you're going to have badly packaged and poorly stored food, which explains the mold and rot on food that students have complained about--you're going to be relying on a hundred different suppliers who will know they've got you over a barrel because you can't just switch to Sysco or what have you.

Don't fucking mess with a system unless you're in it for the long haul and you understand what a gigantic task it is to reinvent EVERYTHING about how an institution works. This whole fucking thing is going to end up costing a vulnerable school district that has far bigger problems just executing its basic mission a lot of money and hassle and it's probably *lost* more people for the cause of healthy eating than it gained.

No shit. They are kids, and had their entire school lunch life undercut by processed food and burgers. The fact the entire kitchen staff also needs to be retrained is also a factor. But from what i read, this program is also coming in at about half the cost.

They need to refine the menu, but not toss it out completely. That would be a mistake.

The mistake would be in not paying attention to what was discovered about what doesn't work rather than just saying, "Oh, they're addicted to burgers, keep at it and we'll turn them into little locavore vegan diet-for-a-small-planet sustainability healthy eaters eventually". That's the same stupid thing that other evangelizing do-gooders do around drugs, or teenage sex, or whatever the current obsession of well-meaning social reformers happens to be at the moment. When you create and impose an entire campaign to make people behave that comes "from above", from people who don't have to live the lives that will be affected, that doesn't address the real cultural and social world that the to-be-reeducated live in, you end up making whatever problem it is that you're trying to tackle much worse. There's no surer way to make sex and drugs more alluring than to make the most clueless, socially autistic administrator in a school go out in front of an assembly and recite some well-meant script that a social psychologist wrote from the comfort of his/her office four hundred miles away. Same here: if you want to change diets, you gotta do it from below, and not just say, "here's your moldy, poorly prepared black bean cake, kids! it's good for you and cheaper than meat anyway". You have to involve the people who will eat the stuff, and that doesn't mean just doing a couple of focus groups and ignoring what they say.

And on the cheaper, you have to think larger than a per meal basis. Think of all the ancillary costs: the consultations, the salaries for middle management that's needed to track down alternative suppliers, the man-hours that go into even limited training to cooking staff, the food that goes completely to waste, and the inevitable costs of "refinement". You don't get to make all that shit an externality and just say "Hey, it's cheaper to do" because the only comparison you're making is a per meal comparison of the cost of ingredients.

Not that it isn't amusing in a dark way to watch someone like Oliver bumble right into this. Maybe they can make next season about Jamie Oliver trying to teach Ethiopians how to eat healthier, since he's running out ofschool  districts of compliant subjects to experiment on.

Part of the mistake probably came from the vast divergence in type of food. I saw the shit they were giving kids: pre-packaged meals that were likely being microwaved, or at the very least required little actual preparation by the kitchen staff. Going from that to actually having to prepare FRESH ingredients is a huge step up in skills required, and if you don't train the people cooking it, you'll get what actually happened. The food tastes like shit and the kids don't want to eat it. Khaldun has the right of it. There's a lot more involved in making this kind of transition than halving the per meal costs. A lot of the meals weren't even prepared on the campus, they were pre-made at a central location and trucked there. Can you imagine a black bean burger cooked by a retard used to nuking a freezer meal, then trucked halfway across the city to sit under a heat lamp for 2 hours?

Ew.

Where did you read about the cost?

I could cut the cost of any school lunch program in half too, all I have to do is make food so terrible that the kids won't eat it.  Then I don't have to bother making as much and save some money.

#1. Here's the picture from the article.

(http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2011-12/66841292.jpg)

Those kids look relativley healthy to me. Where are the lard-o diabetes kids? Granted, it's just one picture, but that's the impression I got from it.

Secondly.


 :uhrr: Didn't we already go over this shit in the Chicken McNuggets thread? Hay man, eat healty, have some noodles and tofu!  :oh_i_see:

There's also theory and practice - or why the Burgers in the pictures at McKFC look so much nicer than the actual product:


Taste test stuff prepared to a high standard versus the day-to-day drudgery put together by people who may not care since they're producing industrial catering.

NC preschooler’s “unhealthy” lunch replaced with cafeteria nuggets (http://myfox8.com/2012/02/14/nc-preschooler-fed-nuggets-because-packed-lunch-wasnt-healthy/)


Not only was the kid given misinformation but it was from our federal government, AND her mother was charged for the lunch the kid didn't eat.

Oh man, that's funny.  That's so funny I might start to cry.

You're all so fucked.  We're all fucked.   :why_so_serious:

Clicked the link thinking it was an Onion article.

It all traces back to one news story that has anonymous sourcing, and single sourcing at that. E.g., there's an unnamed mom saying this happened to their kid. The principal when asked at the end of the original story  is like WTF, I have not heard of this. There's no "state agent" named or quoted who supposedly did this. Call me suspicious--this is the kind of thing Fox News lives to pass on without looking into it more. If it's at all true, though, it really is  :uhrr: even if there was some actual issue with the kid's lunch. (Say, that she was throwing it all away and eating potato chips, or that the turkey was rancid or something like that).

You make a good point;  for my own part, it's worrying that this story is even remotely plausable and doesn't get dismissed out of hand in my own head.

There are so many stories coming out right now that are just off the whoa scale.

Looking into it a bit more--the original source is a local libertarian online news organization that is funded by a conservative free-market foundation. I also have a hard time believing that any state in the current budgetary moment has the funds for a roving band of inspectors who sternly look over the lunches of 4-year olds.

Sowing the seeds of abolishing public food assistance and public schooling in one story.   They only continue to get more cunning.

As proof: This is now making the Facebook rounds. Good luck debunking it.

Surely Snopes will get on the case.  I love snopes.

There's a followup story (http://myfox8.com/2012/02/15/usda-meal-was-not-replaced-mom-was-never-charged/) that clarifies things a little:

It was a clusterfuck relating to an inspection by the state department of education and a teacher who was "stage managing" the lunchroom so they didn't get dinged for a USDA violation.

--Dave

Not Snopes but it is a detailed analysis of what transpired:

http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2012/02/15/a-north-carolina-non-troversy/

Oh Dear God.


So that's that.  Tempest enjoyed in Teacup.

Oh well as long as your not going to CHARGE me for it...then fine, forcefeed my toddler Hostess Cupcakes all day long.  I mean, as long as I don't have to pay for it.  Phew.

I would like to think that any mother who is packing her child such a (relatively) healthy lunch actually gives more of a shit about WHAT they gave her kid...not that it was going to cost her a buck twenty-five.

I would read the comments on the linked story.  It covers your point, which is a little silly.

If someone plonked down courgettes in front of Elena and I thought I was going to be charged, I'd be annoyed too.  It's wasted money, since she won't eat them.  She just won't.  The woman didn't realise she wasn't being charged, nor that this is simply the procedure.

I don't think she's against healthy eating, as such, and we certainly shouldn't judge it thus since we're not sure of the motivation.

The program is for low-income, at-risk children. The mother likely was concerned about being charged for a lunch because she's fucking poor. I'd be a bit upset too if I thought I was going to be charged for something my kid didn't need.

Except that's wrong. an incomplete and sometimes incorrect assessment of the situation.

It was not an isolated incident. In fact, the school sent out a memo, which is why the mother was concerned about being charged for the school-issued lunch.

Here's more.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/exclusive-2nd-n-c-mother-says-daughters-school-lunch-replaced-for-not-being-healthy-enough/ (http://www.theblaze.com/stories/exclusive-2nd-n-c-mother-says-daughters-school-lunch-replaced-for-not-being-healthy-enough/)

Something here isn't adding up, though...if she was poor, her child would have already been on the program, yes?  Then why was she bringing a lunch from home?

Oh well.  Odds are that people on both sides are crazy.

No, no, the actual SCHOOL the child was going to was for at-risk children. It's a special setup outside the normal school system. You have to volunteer and qualify for the program. The school lunch program wasn't a mandatory part of the program. The kid would still have to pay for lunch if she wanted the cafeteria lunch.